I saw Mark's post about the Kingsford charcoal chimney, and I 100% co-sign on the awesomeness of charcoal chimneys. I wanted to share a trick for the fastest and easiest way to start a charcoal chimney.
Back in the aughts, a friend gave me a Weber 20-inch kettle grill, and memories of my uncle gleefully teaching me how to light a charcoal chimney in my formative years spent in Alaska, steered me to this exact charcoal chimney mostly because it was what the big box hardware store around me at the time had on the shelf.
I remember watching my uncle pack wadded up newspaper into the charcoal chimney's base, then staring hypnotically into the flames as if he'd seen the GoT Lord of Light "R'hllor" peeking out between the light and shadows once he'd put flame to it.
As an engineering-minded person, that purchase set off my three-year search for the fastest and easiest way to start a charcoal chimney. Starting with raw newsprint paper sheets (because we were all told as kids that burning the colored funny pages was bad for you, so wouldn't regular ink on newspapers be bad as well?), then moving to newsprint + cooking oil, then newsprint + paraffin cubes, and finally settling on using a charcoal chimney + a butane gas range, as shown in the above photo.
The butane gas range can be had at any local Asian grocery store, along with the butane gas cylinders, and have loads of utility. Set the charcoal-filled charcoal chimney on top of the gas range, turn it on and within minutes the Bunsen Burner effect flowing hot spent gases up the charcoal chimney will create a jet of fire out of the top.
This method leaves no burnt paper ash floating around and the gas range also creates a handy trivet to set the hot charcoal chimney on, as well as allows the chance to easily start another batch should one have underestimated just how much fuel/fire the situation actually called for. I said this is the fastest and easiest method, but I do have to recognize that this probably isn't the safest since there's a raging inferno literally inches away from that butane gas cylinder, but just like David Sedaris' Melbourne friend Pat said, sometimes you have to turn off two burners to be really successful, and in the four-burner analogy of this setup, I'm thinking it's like Fast, Easy, Cleanliness, and Safety, where the two burners killed here are Cleanliness and Safety.
One last tangent to take the burner analogy to the extreme end where all burners are killed save for Fast; I did see this video way back in the aughts during my search for Fast & Easy, where a Purdue staff member named George H. Goble had won the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry by "preparing a barbecue for cooking in less than 5 seconds by the use of a smoldering cigarette, charcoal and LOX (liquid oxygen)" plus a bucket and 10-foot pole.
